


The Weight of Your Bones

by Vongchild



Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Angst, Backstory, Cancer, Canon-Compliant, Canonical Character Death, F/F, Jaeger Academy, K-Day, M/M, Mark I Glory Days, Mark one glory days, Pre-Canon, Second person POV, Smut, Team Hot Dads, The Drift, luna/tamsin week
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-30
Updated: 2013-09-30
Packaged: 2017-12-28 02:14:05
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/986465
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vongchild/pseuds/Vongchild
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A couple of kids from Tottenham grow up to slay dragons and learn a thing or two about living in the process.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Nebulas and Novas and Night Sky

**Author's Note:**

> The various titles are lifted from [a Vienna Teng song](http://viennateng.bandcamp.com/track/never-look-away).
> 
> As usual, many thanks to Quigonejinn, who is a bad influence in all the best ways.

 

You are nine and Luna is seven and there’s a new kid next door who fits right between you, who hops over the back fence down into your tiny garden and at first you don’t know if the interloper’s a boy or a girl. Then she sticks out a raw-knuckled hand and says her name is Tamsin and she’s eight and she’s missing her two top canines, so her incisors just kind of hang there in her mouth looking too big for her face. She asks, “Have you seen a cat?”

You ask, “What’s it look like?” Her mouth puckers like she’s sucking on a lemon.

“He’s got two ears. Four legs. Whiskers. A tail. Um. He’s orange,” she says. “The movers left the door open and he ran off. He’s called Tigger. D’you want to help me look?”

Luna has always loved cats, despite (or maybe because of) not being allowed to keep one. “Can we, Stacks?” she asks you, and you glance towards the kitchen window before you nod.

“Mum’ll be cross if we’re not back for dinner,” you say, and follow Tamsin and Luna over the garden wall.

You miss dinner completely at Tamsin’s insistence, and by the time you find her cat there is mud squelching inside your trainers from stomping around down by the reservoir. You and Luna return home to a stern telling-off, and for you, a week’s grounding, because as the older sibling you ought to have known better. Tamsin climbs the trellis up to your bedroom that night and raps on the window and part of you wants to tell her to go away and part of you thinks she’s pretty swell. So you undo the latch and slide up the pane.

“I’m sorry you got in trouble,” she says.

You look down at her bare feet perched perfectly between clumps of climbing jasmine and think – here’s a girl who’s not afraid of anything. “It’s alright,” you say, and she grins.

“Cool, Stacks,” she says, without you ever telling her to call you that, and she doesn’t climb down the trellis – she jumps. And you think you might be a little bit in love with this girl who moves like a boy.

\------

When you are twelve and Tamsin is eleven and Luna is ten, your father dies. After the funeral, you go out into the back garden with your sister and sit on the bench beneath the climbing jasmine in your cemetery blacks, the shoes mum picked up at the charity shop that are just a little too big and the suit that smells like mothballs. You and Luna are both quiet, your breathing falling into an easy, synchronized rhythm and you can hear the neighbour ladies chattering their condolences in the kitchen, because the window is always cracked open just a little.

Tamsin pokes her head over the wall, and the setting sun turns her messy red hair into a burning halo. She’s got a smear of grease on her cheek, and you know she’s got an engine up on blocks in the adjoining garden. “Can I come over?” she calls. You nod. Tamsin leaps from the top of the wall. You’ve learned this about her by now, that she’s always leaping, and there’s so much about her that confuses you. “Sorry ‘bout your dad,” she says, wiping her hands on the front of her jeans.

“Weren’t your fault,” you say, and without saying anything, Tamsin finds space between you and Luna on the bench where there wasn’t any before. She does that – she never wants the end, always the middle, always both Pentecost siblings if she can have them.

“That shit club owner, right?” she asks. “He should be locked up.”

One of the neighbour ladies brings out plates of food for you and Luna, seems surprised to see Tamsin sitting between you, and then brings out another plate. You eat – Caribbean curry hot enough that if there are tears at the corners of your eyes, you can pretend it’s from the spice.

“We should do something,” says Tamsin around a mouthful of potato. “Like Batman.”

You look at your sister. You say, “Luna, go inside.”

“But Stacks—“ she protests. You scrunch up your brow, and you deepen your voice, and you’re not just a little boy playing around anymore.

“Go inside,” you say, and Luna goes, stomping in her squeaking Mary Janes. You turn your attention to Tamsin and ask her, “What would Batman do?”

“Show the arsehole just who he messed with,” she says. “He took your dad and he deserves to lose something, too.” There is something ferocious inside her, fire behind her glass-green eyes. You nod, because there is something ferocious inside you, too, some howling, wounded beast ready to do whatever it takes.

It is Tamsin Sevier who pours the petrol, but you, Stacker Pentecost - you spark the flames. And you’re the one who gets caught because you won’t give Tamsin up. Because when only one of you can make it over the chain link, you shove her over and you face the headlights and your fate. 

Days later, your trunk’s all packed and you’re leaving for military school tomorrow morning and Tamsin raps on your window. You have never been happier to see her. She climbs in and she looks at your trunk and she says, “Well, it’s not quite Hogwarts.”

You snort. Tamsin shoves her hands into her pockets and rocks on the heels of her bare feet. “I’m sorry I got you in trouble,” she says.

“I got myself in trouble,” you say, and you’re convinced of it  - you were going to do something stupid with or without Tamsin. All that hurt and nowhere to go with it, something was bound to happen. “Bastard had it coming.”

You sit on top of your school trunk. Tamsin sits beside you and takes one of your hands in hers and you remember – there is so much about her that confuses you. That she is all hard angles but soft edges, that she smells like motor oil and dirt but also like Pears soap and jasmine. “If you don’t write to me, Stacks,” she threatens, “I’m gonna tell everyone we know that you’re a wanker.” She shoves you. You shove her back. “It’ll be boring without you around,” she says.

“You’ve got Luna,” you reply.

“That’s like wearing one shoe but not the other,” she scoffs, and then she turns to you and there’s that dangerous look in her eye. You’ve never figured out if you’re supposed to get nervous or excited when she gets that look. Both, maybe. “Hold still,” says Tamsin. “I want to try something.” So you hold still, and she kisses you, and you can feel every chapped spot on her lips where she’s chewed them raw. Her nose brushes softly against yours, and then she pulls away. You feel – bewildered, mostly.

“What was that for?” you ask, harsher than you mean it to be.

“Just to try it,” she says defensively. “And so some poshy bitch doesn’t go and do it for me.”

“Tam,” you say, because you’re not following.

“I thought that maybe if I did that you wouldn’t forget me, not matter what sorts of people you meet at school,” she says, looking down at your still-entwined hands. She pulls her fingers away from yours.

“That’s stupid,” you tell her. “I just said I’d write to you.”

“Well I didn’t kiss you cos I fancy you, just so that’s clear,” she retorts, and maybe she’s going to go climb back out the window but she gets about halfway across your little bedroom before she stops and goes back to you and pulls you into the fiercest hug you’ve ever had. “And you better not stop talking like you’re from Tottenham,” she hisses.

You watch her leap from your windowsill, and the last you see of her is the red of her hair as she disappears over the garden wall.

\-----

You are seventeen and Tamsin is sixteen and Luna is fifteen, and you know Tamsin’s kissed your sister because they’ve both copped to practicing snogging with each other. You know Tamsin thinks she needs to stop because it’s not just practice to her anymore because she told you so in a letter and you know Luna’s been feeling the same way because of a different letter.

Tamsin knows you’ve been trading blow jobs with another cadet from your sixth form program and every time she gets on the phone with you, she makes slurping noises like it’s the funniest thing in the world and you threaten to stop calling. She still does it. You keep calling. You don’t tell her that your sister fancies her and you consider yourself even.

\-----

You are twenty-one and Tamsin is twenty and Luna is nineteen, and you know they are pashing for real when they come home from RAF training for winter hols and go into Luna’s bedroom and lock the door behind them. You ask mum what she thinks of this development, and she smiles and hands you a bundle of rhubarb to slice up for pie. “As long as Luna’s not going to go and get herself pregnant, then who am I to judge?” she asks. “Tamsin’s a nice girl.”

You have kept the secrets of your childhood troublemaking long enough that even you believe this.

Tamsin slaps you on the shoulder when she sits down for dinner, says, “You couldn’t have clued us in, Stacks?”

You tell her, “You figured it out on your own well enough.”

“Sure,” Luna chimes in, “But it took four years.”

None of the three of you talk like you’re from Tottenham anymore.

\-----

You are twenty-seven and Tamsin is twenty-six and Luna is twenty-five, and you are sitting in a bar in some posh London hotel that you’ve already forgotten the name of, watching a news feed that looks like a science fiction movie and trying to make contact with your sister, but she’s not answering her phone. You want her to pick up and tell you that she’s safe.

Instead, she calls you and tells you that she’s about to fly into combat against the giant dinosaur that just took out the Golden Gate Bridge. Because she was nuts enough to volunteer to do it. Oh, and Tamsin says hi.

Trying not to let on how much the possibility of losing both of them scares you, you tell her, “Be careful. It looks like the apocalypse out there.”

Luna, sharp and fierce and beautiful. Luna, who raised herself because your father wasn’t there and then you weren’t there, either. Luna says – “Not if I have anything to say about it.” And there is so much you want to say to her between when you hear her over-emphasize the _t_ and when the line goes dead and you say none of it.

You think you stop blinking. You think you stop breathing. You think you temporarily die.

Tamsin limps back to London with what remains of their squadron a week later. After the funeral – empty casket, a formality - you sit beside her on the bench beneath the climbing jasmine in your cemetery blacks, huddled beneath a single umbrella, and you feel Luna’s absence so keenly that the postage-stamp garden feels bigger for it. You remember a different funeral, spicy curry and the smell of petrol. “I taught her how to jump out of her window,” says Tamsin, leaning against your shoulder.

“Of course you did,” you say.

“I taught her how to not be afraid of anything. Not even death,” says Tamsin, shoulders shaking. “And I’m sorry I got her into trouble.”

“It wasn’t your fault, Tam,” you say.

Later, you lean on the bathroom counter and watch Tamsin cut her long red hair short. “I was always talking about doing this,” she says, fluffing her bangs. “Luna said she wanted to see it when I did.”

She sleeps beside you in your too-small single bed that night, in the room where there are still glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling that your dad put up when you were born.

\-----

You are twenty-eight and Tamsin is twenty-seven, and you are consulting with the Pan Pacific Defense Corps on how to take down Kaiju. Tamsin calls while you’re eating dinner, and you tell her that today, you moved a giant robotic arm using your mind. She says, “Sounds like something out of _Gundam_.”

“Well,” you say, “The enemy’s something out of _Godzilla_.” She laughs. Sometimes you think that the world _broke_ last year, like some plot device Douglas Adams would have been proud to call his own, and now everything is running on cartoon logic and no one has stopped to really notice.

“Buy you a drink?” asks someone just out of your line of sight.

“Sounds like you’ve got an admirer,” says Tamsin. “Catch you later, Stacks.” The line goes dead. You look up at the freckled face of Hercules Hansen, who joined the project after the Sydney attack back in September. A widower, five years your senior with an angry speck of a kid who reminds you, in the strangest way, of yourself at that age. It’s not immediately clear whether this is a come-on or his idea of making conversation.

“I wasn’t aware there was anything to be bought,” you say.

“Pretty sure I saw some Coca-Cola in the commissary,” says Herc. “Hope I didn’t interrupt anything.” You shake your head as you get up from the table, and Herc walks a comfortable distance from you. He’s just trying to make friends, you decide. “What was it?” he asks.

“What?”

“The phone call.”

“Oh,” you realize. “A friend from back home in London. We keep tabs on each other.” What would Tamsin say about Herc? Probably _he’s cute, you should fuck him_. But Tamsin’s always been a bad influence, and you’re pretty sure that she lives vicariously through your hookups because she’s been in a steady relationship since—

Well, not anymore.

Herc hands you a bottle of soda, buys an extra for his kid – wherever he’s gotten off to, and that could be anywhere. You remember being not much older, anger burning holes in the soles of your shoes if you stood still for too long. “What do you think about the move they’re talking about? Up to Alaska?”

“If the funding comes through,” you say, which you think it has a good chance of doing after today. “I’ll go. I’ve got every plan to be inside one of those Jaegers once they’re built.”

“Score to settle?” asks Herc.

“Don’t we all?” you ask. You know why he’s here - _Sydney_. You decide to tell him, “My sister was one of the fighter pilots who went down in San Francisco.” Herc nods, and you’re wending your ways back towards the temporary housing set up for staff and paying closer attention than you should be to the lines around his eyes.

“I should go track down Chuck,” says Herc.

“Thanks for the drink,” you say. So no, you do not fuck him.

\-----

You are twenty-nine and Tamsin is twenty-eight, and her first night beside you in the Jaeger academy mess hall, she looks down and across your table at the Hansen brothers and she says to you, “He’s cute, you should fuck him.”

“Which one?” you ask.

“The one who doesn’t look like he’s a gas mask and a pickaxe away from being a serial killer,” she says.

“You mean Herc.”

“Is the not-creepy one?” she asks. You nod. “Yes. Him,” she says. “He’s cute and you should fuck him.” There’s not a way to answer that that isn’t either embarrassing or unprofessional, but it’s not like you _haven’t_ considered it. “You’re like Luna, Stacks. You can’t resist an attractive ginger in uniform.”

“Can we talk about this later?” you ask. She grins, sly like a fox, studs twinkling at the corners of her eyes. When the announcement came out that all pilot candidates would need a partner, you texted each other simultaneously. There was never, ever a question that you would be drift compatible. Of course you are.

Still, the first time they put you in the test drift rig, you rabbit so hard that the software crashes. Because _you just want to slay a dragon be careful it looks like the apocalypse out there not if I have anything to say about it find the sod’s ball-sack and give it a proper kick I’ve got an idea sidewinder down its throat don’t do anything stupid I’ve got the shot I’ve got him watch your flank no no no no no Luna NO NO NO please don’t leave me here alone I don’t know how to be alone_. You and Tamsin take off your helmets and vomit in unison. Dr. Lightcap is smiling.

“Well, that was an interesting reaction,” she says. You and Tamsin lean on each other as you get to your feet and there’s some kind of weird biofeedback going on where you’re pretty sure you can feel her hand on your forearm from her point of view.

“K-Day,” Tamsin says shakily. “His sister. I just showed him how she died, I didn’t mean to mess things up.”

“I wanted to see,” you say, because you did, and because you sure as hell aren’t going to let Tamsin take sole blame for this magnificent fuck up. If you stay, you stay together. If you wash out, you wash out together.

“Well, better you do it here than in a Jaeger,” says Dr. Lightcap. “It was a good connection. We’ll try again tomorrow.”

You stagger back to the barracks, still leaning on each other, and Tamsin flops onto your bunk because she’s too tired to climb onto hers. She watches you run the electric kettle. “Ever the Englishman, Stacks.” You brew two cups of Earl Grey from bags, no cream and no sugar but the warm mugs feel good on your hands, that’s the weird thing that getting inside someone’s head does, and the wearing off of it sort of feels like having a limb wake up from sleep, pins and needles all up and down your spine. You sit down beside Tamsin.

“She was my best friend,” says Tamsin. “I mean, not that you aren’t my best friend, but it was different with her. Because it was like – I loved her so fucking much, Stacks. I’d jump off a building if it meant having her back. And – I tried to tell her not to do it, and to tell her to look out, and they were going to call the retreat any minute and nuke the thing to hell and it was pointless that she died, Stacks. So fucking pointless.”

You feel the tears burning behind her eyes, red hot.

“We’d talked, you know?” says Tamsin, and you say you don’t know. “About what we’d do after we got out of the RAF,” she continues. “Because we only had a couple years left. We were going to do some traveling. Maybe get married.” She takes a long sip from her mug. “Probably get married.”

Tamsin falls asleep on your bunk that night, and when you try to climb the ladder to go sleep on hers, she grabs your hand and doesn’t let you go.

_Mum gets remarried and you move and she promises there will be kids to play with at the new house_   
_The stars on the ceiling are arranged like real constellations and you fall asleep to the light of Orion and Capricorn_   
_The first time you three all got drunk together and tried to come up with secrets but there were none left to tell_   
_A funeral in the rain for someone who doesn’t quite feel dead but isn’t alive either anymore, and the soles of your shoes sinking into the mud and you can’t believe you wore heels for this_   
_When you were twelve in juvenile court and you realized no one thought anything good would ever come of you and you decided you were going to prove them wrong_   
_Petrol_   
_An orange tabby hiding in the weeds_   
_Tamsin laughing, her hair all lit up like the fire behind her, and oh shit_   
_Shaking the first time she kissed you and it was for real_   
_Sand on your lips and salt in your mouth_   
_Chicken and potatoes hot and spiced and maybe you’re crying and maybe it’s the food_   
_What would Batman do?_   
_She never climbs down she always leaps_   
_And you think you’re a little bit in love._


	2. Memories You Bury or Live By

You are twenty-nine and Tamsin is twenty-eight, and they give you a Jaeger and tell you to name it. Together, you pick Coyote Tango. It feels right. There is something ferocious inside Tamsin, all caged up behind her glass-green eyes. There is something ferocious inside you, too: sad and angry and hungry and howling and ready to strike.

Six weeks later, Coyote Tango and Lucky Seven, the Hansen’s Jaeger, make their first kill off the coast of Okinawa and it is the finest rush you have ever felt.

Back at the Tokyo Shatterdome, Scott Hansen pulls out alcohol rations he has been squirreling away for god knows how long, some kind of awful Australian lager that you really have to already be drunk to truly appreciate. Your little group of four sits hunched around a table in the empty mess – it’s three in the morning, Chuck came to the helipad long enough to see that his father was alive and then vanished again – and you drink until your head buzzes.

Herc rises from the table first. Tamsin suggests to him, “Why don’t you make sure Stacks makes it back to the barracks in one piece?” You hiss to her that you are not _that_ drunk. She hisses back, “Relax, I’m taking care of you.” Never mind that it’s not even a given that Herc’s _interested_. You play along and follow Herc out of the mess.

“I’m really not that drunk,” you say. There’s a foot of space between your right elbow and Herc’s left.

“Of course you’re not, big guy like you,” he says. “It’s just a better idea not to argue with your copilot.”

It’s funny how that foot of space disappears, so that by the time you’re almost at your door, your forearms keep brushing and you keep apologizing and resolving to walk further away from each other but you don’t. You ask, “Do you want to come in? I could make tea.”

“Sounds good,” says Herc, following you in. Ranger barracks look the same the world over, bunks built for a pair of pilots and enough counter space for a sink and a hot plate and a fridge. If you’re lucky, you get an en suite. You and Tamsin are lucky. You run the kettle. “Gets cold around here at night,” says Herc. He sits on your bunk because there is nowhere else to sit.

“The kettle may take a while,” you tell him.

“I’m going to be honest, Stacker, I didn’t come in here for tea.”

You stop pretending like you’re debating the relative merits of raspberry zinger and chai spice and go to sit beside him. The first kiss is awkward, just to get it out of the way. The second is electric, with a rasp of teeth. The third and the fourth and the fifth and the sixth, and you are shedding layers, boots and boiler suits and socks and tank tops and underwear, it’s too much to wear after spending eight hours in a drivesuit and you want to feel air on your skin, skin on your skin.

He kisses a line down your neck, stubble scraping against your Adam’s apple, and he tells you that it’s been a while since he’s done this but he has done this before. “How long?” you ask, and he says sometime before he was married – so he might be out of practice. “It’s like riding a bicycle,” you say.  

“I will definitely think about that while I’m blowing you,” says Herc. And he is kissing down, down, and you are leaning back, back, until your head bumps against the wall behind your bunk and his fingers graze you and you shudder. You feel the warmth of his breath against you, and you sit up so you can watch the way his shoulders clench when he lowers his head and oh, he’s not out of practice at all.

You groan. Low, deep in your chest, a sound you don’t consciously make. Herc’s mouth is warm around you, lips and tongue, hard and soft palette, the way the muscles at the top of his throat clench, and you put a hand in his hair to push him closer and his neck clenches when he resists, just a little bit, and you can’t tell him what to do because what he is going to do anyway is better than whatever ideas you had.

Herc swallows, and you know the reasoning – cleaner. Knock it back like a shot and it looks real impressive, you’re going to have the taste in your mouth anyway. You learned that in sixth form – it’s military efficiency, isn’t it? Herc sits beside you again, and he kisses you with a calloused hand on your chin. You trail your lips from his jaw to his neck to his collarbone, feel the jaggedness of an old break with your mouth and Herc grunts, “Rugby.” You have never heard him say something more quintessentially Australian in the year and a half you have known him. You laugh. He gives your head a gentle shove.

You kiss lower, lingering over how his abdominal muscles clench and the way his breath catches. And then, just as you have put your lips around him for the first time, there is a knock on the door.

“Hey, are you guys decent?” shouts Tamsin.

“No!” Herc shouts back.

Tamsin opens the door anyway. “I’m not looking, I’m not looking,” she says, and goes straight into the bathroom. “Ignore me!”

You look at Herc. Herc shrugs at you. It sounds like Tamsin is running the shower. You sigh, but it comes out as a laugh, and then you lean down and try to finish Herc as quickly as you can. He’s laughing by the time he comes. “Maybe another night, yeah?” he asks. You swallow and drag a wrist across your mouth.

“Another night,” you agree, and you both get dressed and you make tea and you ask Tamsin if she wants any, and she comes out of the bathroom with her hair wet, wrapped in a robe with planes printed on the terrycloth. You recognize it as an old Christmas gift from Luna.

“Sorry,” she says. She glances at Herc. To you, she says quietly, “I’ll explain later,” and takes a mug from you with steady hands. Herc finishes his tea and leaves after giving you a squeeze on the shoulder that is probably the closest you’re going to get to affectionate right now. Tamsin watches the door shut behind him – you know that look, it is her _appreciating an ass_ look - and then says, “Are you going to thank me?”

“Thank you, Tamsin,” you say. “And now are you going to explain what you’re doing back so soon?”

“Someday,” she says, “Scott Hansen will do something truly awful, and I will not be surprised,” and leaves it at that.

A week later, Lucky Seven is transferred to Long Beach.

\-----

You are thirty and Tamsin is twenty-nine, and you are on the ground in Tokyo fighting a category three Kaiju, codename Onibaba. “If we make it through this,” Tamsin says, “I am never eating shellfish again, I swear.” And you pull back your fist and throw your best punch, because if you don’t make it through this then the next option this far inland is nuclear. Also, you’ll be dead.

The Kaiju parries your punch with a sideswipe from one of its massive pincers, and Coyote Tango staggers backwards. In your feedback cradle, your head snaps forward and back hard enough to give you whiplash, and to your right, Tamsin does the same. You feel a rush of static through the drift from her, but there’s no time to worry – you have to hit back or you’ll go down. You find your balance and hit the kaiju.

_Scott Hansen leers at you, alcohol on his breath, asks – so where else are you pierced?_

“Tam?” you ask. You’re both veterans by now, and if Tamsin’s sending you RABITs at a time like this then something’s not right. You feel your Jaeger’s weight shift beneath you. Are you hit? The synchronization alarm is ringing. You think _now, really,_ and look over at Tamsin. She is seizing in her harness, back arched and arms rigid and suddenly you have bigger problems than just a glitch in your neural handshake.

_A green scarf you got for Christmas a vacation in France when you were five an orange kitten with paws too big for his body looking at rings maybe someday marking down hours in your pilot’s diary your bare feet crashing against the pavers in the back garden the first time you saw Stacker and Luna and you knew you would be friends_

You shout to LOCCENT, “I need you to cut Tamsin out of the drift!” They tell you that you can’t pilot solo and you need to bring her back into alignment. Coyote Tango staggers. On your display, you see Onibaba turning, carving a path further into the city. You’re not attacking anymore, why should it bother with you?

_Your father smiling only you don’t remember what he looks like a man with tattoos threading a needle through your eyebrow the first time someone told you about menstrual periods booking a vacation you never got to take you should have been in that courtroom too flying out to Vandenberg to train LUNA LUNA LUNA LUNA_

“I need you to cut her out, she’s not going to come back into line,” you tell LOCCENT. You are desperate. They have her brain waves on a screen – who doesn’t recognize a grand mal when they see one? They tell you again – you can’t pilot alone. You tell them, “If you don’t cut her out, you’re going to lose me, and her, and the entire city. Let me try.”

The drift goes gloriously quiet. Tamsin shakes beside you, but below your feet, Coyote Tango is rock steady. You step onto your right foot, the side you never control, and you scream from the effort but the Jaeger moves. And then you step onto the left and it is like walking through molasses mixed with broken glass but you’re moving, you’re doing it. One foot and then the other, right and then left, marching like they taught you to do when you were twelve and delinquent and newly-arrived at a school for hopeless cases. You catch up to the kaiju, and then you fight it.

You fight it for three hours.

You fight it with your fists and your missiles and every ounce of strength left in you. You fight it with blood pouring down your nose and sweat pooling in your drive suit. You fight it until it falls and does not rise again and LOCCENT confirms the kill.

You come out of your deafeningly silent drift and tell Coyote Tango’s AI to run a scan for survivors. Then, you’re at Tamsin’s side in seconds, uncoupling her from the feedback cradle and easing off her helmet. Her breathing is shallow, her skin pale and clammy, but she has a pulse, and as you lower her onto the bulkhead, her eyelids flutter.

“Stacks?” she asks. “Is the fight over?”

“Yes,” you tell her. “The retrieval team is coming and they’re going to help you.”

“Help me?” she asks, confused. Maybe she sees the worry that creases your brow. The AI pings – one human heat signature in the wreckage. Close. Moving towards you.

“I’m going to go check on that,” you tell Tamsin. “Just wait here.”

“Okay,” she says, curling up on herself. “My head hurts, Stacks. Why does my head hurt?”

You climb out of the emergency hatch on Coyote Tango’s head and survey the rubble. You see cars crushed under fallen roofs, street signs bent at odd angles. Fighting a kaiju once it makes landfall is messy, but it beats nuking the city and calling it a day. At the center of what you imagine was a busy intersection just this morning, a flash of blue catches your eye. At first you think it is a tarp blowing in the wind, but then your eyes adjust to the light better, and you realize – this is the survivor from the scan. She is tiny, and your heart aches.

They evacuate you and Tamsin and the little girl from the rubble back to the Shatterdome on the same helicopter. Tamsin is asleep on a stretcher in the back the whole time and the girl – there’s a label in her coat with her name on it in neatly-printed kanji and the chopper pilot says it says _Mako_ – rides with you up front, one hand pressed over her eyes and the other still clutching the red shoe she was holding when Onibaba fell.   

Physically, there’s nothing wrong with Mako. She’ll go live with relatives and that will be the end of it. It’s Tamsin’s health you should be worried for. She disappears off everyone’s radar for a few days after Onibaba – even yours. Her absence makes you antsy – you try to explain it to Herc over Skype, but you can’t quite get the words right. He says he thinks he understands, and he’ll try to make it back to Tokyo soon.

Then, Tamsin reappears and the higher-ups take you both off the active roster. Cancer, she tells you, from Coyote Tango’s reactor and from the explosions on K-Day. “I don’t want you to watch me die,” she says, like she’s building a wall and cutting you off.  Three days later, she flies to Hawaii to start treatment, and it feels like she’s taken your lungs with her.

Mako Mori winds up back at the Shatterdome – her family doesn’t have patience for a scared little girl who can’t stop her nightmares. You have a wild idea and Herc tells you it’s a good one. You adopt her, and fly out to Anchorage together a week later.

On the plane, Mako asks you if you will teach her how to drive a Jaeger. You say, “Maybe. Some day,” and worry what you’ve gotten yourself into.

Herc laughs at the story over the phone and he tells you, “Parenthood.”

\-----

 

You are thirty-one and Tamsin is thirty, and you tell Tamsin that with all due respect her decision to suffer alone is bollocks and you are going to visit. Mako’s been asking about your co-pilot and you have vacation time and you’re tired of walking around feeling like you can’t breathe. Tamsin fights you the whole time you’re making plans, says you should come in a few months when she’s finished chemo and will hopefully have some of her hair back and you refuse, you’re not going to do that, you’ve waited long enough to see her—

She’s not happy, but she tells you to knock yourself out.

Mako spends the first half of the flight asking questions and worrying that Tamsin won’t like her. She spends the second half sleeping with your arm draped over her, and doesn’t wake up until the captain announces your descent into Honolulu. “Thank you for keeping the monsters away, Sensei,” she whispers in your ear. You spent weeks trying to get her to call you Stacker when she first started living with you, but, well, she insists.

You rent a car, and Mako watches the ocean anxiously out windows. You say, “No kaiju will come today, Mako-chan,” but she doesn’t seem convinced. She walks exactly in your footsteps at the hospital, sticking one pace behind and stretching to match your wide strides.

Tamsin cries at the sight of you, and it’s strange to see her so thin and so pale and you understand why she didn’t want you here but her arms around your ribcage are as tight as ever. You feel like you can finally exhale. “I missed you, Stacks,” she says. “I didn’t want to tell you how much I missed you, but I did.”

Tamsin talks to Mako for an hour in haltingly careful Japanese and as much English as they can navigate together. “I used to take care of Stacks,” Tamsin explains. “Made sure he ate his veggies and got enough sleep. Now you’ve got to do that for me since I can’t, okay?” Mako nods vigorously.

“Did you really get sick from driving a Jaeger?” she asks.

“Yeah, I did,” says Tamsin sadly. Mako frowns.

“Will Sensei get sick from driving a Jaeger?” she asks. Tamsin looks at you. You shake your head – _don’t tell her yet_.

“I don’t know,” says Tamsin. Before you leave, she fixes you with a look and whispers in your ear, “You’ll have to deal with this someday. You’re not immortal, Stacks. None of us are.” You wonder what happened to the girl who used to leap from your second-floor bedroom window.

Herc’s waiting for you when you arrive at the next Shatterdome, and the tired hug you give him only ends when Chuck and Mako get into a fist fight, which as of late seems like the only common language they speak.

\-----

You are thirty-four, and Tamsin is thirty-three, and you lose Gipsy Danger and two pilots off the Alaskan coast. That’s the short story. The long story is you lose Yancy Becket off the coast, and the Jaeger when Raleigh Becket stumbles it onto the beach, thirty-five miles from Anchorage city limits and it’s amazing he made it that far. You would know. It’s nearly impossible to pilot solo with no damage and your copilot unconscious but alive beside you. Worse, you imagine, missing an arm, with a hole in the hull and a bloody streak in the back of your mind.

You lose Raleigh Becket when he walks from the service. You worry about him, worry he might go do something stupid like kill himself.

“You’ve got to stop seeing so much of yourself in these kids,” Tamsin tells you. She’s in remission, her hair nearly reaching her chin, and she’s visiting for two weeks partly for the novelty of being back on base but mostly because Mako asked her to because she thought you needed your partner.  In a way, you think, Tamsin’s here for Mako, too: Chuck replaced his uncle as Herc’s co-pilot a year ago, and Mako still seethes with jealousy whenever she thinks you’re not looking.

“I don’t want Mako to be a pilot because I want her to survive the war,” you confide to Tamsin, late one night. She lies beside you on your narrow bed and with your breathing matched it’s easy to forget what year it is for a second or two.

Tamsin shoves you. “You’re being selfish,” she says. “You owe that girl her shot at revenge.”

In the morning, you tell Mako she can start at the academy after her birthday.

\-----

You are thirty-eight and Tamsin is thirty-seven and the prognosis isn’t good for anyone. Not for her and her tumor that won’t stop growing, not for you and your nose bleeds, not for humanity and their coastal wall, and not for the PPDC and your shuttered Shatterdomes. Herc tries to reassure you when the Security Council pulls the plug on the Icebox, tells you they’re just suits and ties and pomp and circumstance.

“Are we failing?” you ask Herc. You both watch Tendo Choi wander out of LOCCENT, with about the same spring in his step as a man taking a sick dog to be put down.

Herc pats your cheek. “Not without a fight,” he says. And then, changing the subject, he asks, “How’s Tamsin?”

“Not good,” you tell him. “If I had my way I’d be in Honolulu with her right now.” But here you are instead, tearing down the house that Caitlin Lightcap built.

“You should go,” Herc says. “You and Mako both. You need to be there with her for this. Tendo and I can finish cleaning up here.”

“Thanks,” you say. You look around LOCCENT, and it’s quiet now, but it’s easy to remember the lights and sounds. You’ve run some great Jaegers out of here. Had some great times.

“Stack,” says Herc. “Do you ever think about what you’ll do after we close the breach?”

“Herc,” you say, very seriously. “You know I’m dying, right?”

Herc nods. “One day at a time, I guess.”

He goes with you back to the tiny, Spartan apartment you’ve kept all these years working in the dome, and together you drink what remains of the good whiskey. You fall into bed, and Herc falls on top of you. “I’ll go to Hawaii. Soon,” you promise. He kisses you and tastes like melancholy. War has made old men out of you. “What will you do when the breach is closed?”

“Live,” says Herc, undoing the buttons on your shirt. His is already off and you like him better that way, he’s always looked ridiculous in a suit. “It’d be nice to have company.” He fucks you slowly. Tenderly. Bittersweet, like some part of him fears it’s the last chance he’ll get.

You and Mako fly to Hawaii, like you said you would. Tamsin is in and out of consciousness when you arrive, her skin so brittle that you can see every vein in her arms. “Did you come to watch me die, Stacks?” she asks.

You nod. “Sorry, Tam.”

She cracks a smile, just for you. “Pull up a chair, then,” she says. “I’m just getting started.”

It takes just over two weeks for her to fade – a little, a little, and then all at once, she slips away from you. You find Mako sitting under a hibiscus bush in the hospital garden, and when you sit down beside her, she leans against you and cries. You remember – a different garden, a different plant, a girl with two missing teeth who climbed the trellis like a ladder.

\-----

You are less than a month past your thirty-ninth birthday, and you climb into a Jaeger beside Chuck Hansen.

_An orange cat and sodden trainers_  
 _You are young and you are hurt and you are angry_  
 _A puppy, mostly wrinkles, and you know it’s a bribe but you take it anyway and you say this doesn’t make you even_  
 _No one in that courtroom thought you would ever amount to anything and you were going to prove them wrong_  
 _Petrol_  
 _Jasmine flowers blooming in spring_  
 _Learning to march and aching to be good at it_  
 _The first time you drift and you rabbit so hard the software crashes and you vomit_  
 _You are going to be good at this because you have a legacy and you will not fail you will not let yourself fail_  
 _Always leaping never climbing_  
 _You fight because you see yourselves in each other_  
 _And you thought you were a little bit in love._

 

 


End file.
